The growth is putting
pressure on Islamic meetingplaces across Canada.

“We have been experiencing this kind of steady increase
for a while,” said Amin Elshorbagy, president of the Canadian Islamic Congress,
in a 2013 article in the National Post.

.

“We can see this in terms of the need to expand our
infrastructure. Most of our Islamic centres are becoming very crowded.”

If Muslim meetingplaces
are crowded, and many churches are empty—well, there’s an opportunity here. And some Muslims and Christians in Canada are taking advantage of it.

In August, the empty
Lincoln Road United Church in Windsor, Ont. was sold to the Masjid
Noor-Ul-Islam Madressa and Cultural Centre.

In Sydney, Nova Scotia,
the unused Holy Redeemer church hall was sold to a group of Muslim families as
a prayer and worship centre.

Now something similar
might happen in Winnipeg, where a group of Muslims has indicated an interest in
buying the former St. Giles Presbyterian Church on Burrows Avenue. (Which I wrote about earlieron this blog.)

Some Christians might
find this to be unusual, or even unacceptable. But turning sacred spaces from
one religion to another is not a new phenomenon.

One of the earliest
conversions happened in 705 in Damascus, when a church dedicated to John the
Baptist became the Grand Mosque, also known as the Umayyad Mosque.

And the Hagia Sophia in
present-day Istanbul had existed for about a thousand years as a church before
it was converted into a mosque in 1453 following the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople.

And it isn't only
Muslims who have taken over the sacred spaces of others. Christianity has
a rich history in this regard, too.

In the sixth and seventh
centuries, when missionaries Christianized Europe, one of the common practices
was for them to convert pagan shrines. One of the earliest stories involves St.
Boniface.

As recounted by Bamber
Gascoigne in his book, The Christians, Boniface marched into a
pagan shrine in Germany where people worshipped a massive oak tree dedicated to
Thor, the god of Thunder.

Using an axe, he cut it down, and used the wood
to build a chapel to St. Peter.

That was then.
Today, the conversions are going the other way as Canadian
Christianity experiences a profound upheaval.

It’s a win-win
situation. Not only can Muslims find new places to worship, the present
owners get out from under a financial burden which might threaten to sink them.

And since many of these
churches are historic, the other winner is the rest of us, and the
communities we live in, as we see these buildings revitalized, repaired
and repurposed instead of becoming derelict or torn down.